There's no shortage on advice regarding what people should do to improve a web site's position in the search engine listings. It is easy to become confused when you consume all the information that is available, because some folks agree with others while some totally disagree and offer dissimilar advice.
You should be extremely suspicious of any advice given by someone that tells you to use search engine submissions, employ traffic exchanges, or use FFA sites. That is so out of date it's not funny.
What is pertinent for excellent rankings in the search engines was highlighted not too long ago via a survey done by SEOmoz of a collection of SEO professionals.
In short, below are the 4 most important search engine optimization ranking factors, in accordance with the experts' consensus views.

Keywords that Appear in the Title
Using the correct keywords when crafting the title tag of a page is of extreme importance. It does not only promote higher rankings, it also helps with the click-through from the SE listings to the destination page. It is of lesser value to be listed high in the results without receiving that many clicks. The ultimate purpose is to gain as many targeted visitors to your site as possible.
The keywords that were used by the searcher are bolded in the results of the search.

When the right keyphrase of the page title is bolded, it gives the listing a higher opportunity of being seen and receiving a click. Nevertheless, highlighted keywords are not the only thing to think about when writing the page title tag.
Lots of additional clicks can be attained from a smartly written page title tag, especially when it invites the searcher to click. It is better to attract a hundred clicks from position number five with an eye-catching title tag than fifty clicks from position number three with a badly written title tag, correct?
Anchor Text used by Inbound Links
The anchor text that is employed in the link that points to your web site from an external site counts a lot in the search engine algorithms to figure out what your site is all about. Additionally, what your site is all about defines to a large extent what keywords it will rank for in the search results.
If at all you can influence in any way the anchor text that other web sites employ when they link to you, then it's an extremely prudent way of investing your time.
A larger number of external sites that have links to your site employing a certain set of keywords, or alternate versions of that keyword, will prompt the SE's to more readily compute that your site is all about that specific keyphrase.
It's far more advantageous if the content of the destination page on your site contains that particular keyword and phrases similar in meaning.
The Universal Link Popularity of Your Site
Search engines figure out the relative importance of a site from the volume of hyperlinks that point to the web site. They include both quality of hyperlinks and quantity of the hyperlinks.

The more different web sites that have links to your web site, the higher the SE's will calculate the deemed importance of your site.
Link building is a never-ending process. One can never have a sufficient number of backlinks pointing to your site. It's true that it is possible to build links too fast and that can raise some alerts in the algorithms of the search engines. But, if it's done as an ongoing effort with a long-term outlook, every backlink deserves the resources spent in acquiring it. They all add up to an improved deemed importance of your web site.
Link Popularity in the Site's Internal Link Structure
The fact is that some of your web pages will get more external links than others. Those that do not get a lot of external links could be the actual money pages that you would wish to rank well in the SE indexes.
The internal linking structure, in addition to the anchor text employed in the internal links, is the way to disperse PageRank inside your own site.
Some search engine optimization professionals say that an internal link to a page has the same value as a link from an external page.

That doesn't mean the site will rank with nothing more than internal links. What it means is that you could cause a page to be ranked by having internal links pointing to it even though it does not have lots of external links, on the condition that the remainder of the web site has acquired enough trust from external links.
Conclusion
SEO might appear daunting when one views it as a whole. However, when viewed as individual focus areas, there are a select number of relatively easy areas one can concentrate on and make the largest benefits.